Chapter Four: Sign Or Drown

Natasha's POV

I laughed. Actually laughed.

It came out wrong — too sharp, too close to the edge of something else — but it was that or scream, and screaming felt like it would cost more than I had left in me.

"You want to marry me," I said. "Twenty-four minutes after I broke a sculpture at your wedding to someone else."

"I want to marry someone," Ace said, not moving from across the table. "You're simply the version of that problem I already have on file."

"Romantic."

"I didn't ask for romantic."

His lawyer sat two seats down, silent, sliding a folder toward me like a dealer laying down cards. I didn't open it. I already knew what was inside would be worse than the number I imagined, because everything about this man so far had been.

"Twenty million," Ace said, before I could ask. "A private residence. The Harrington sculpture — cleared. One year, on paper. Then you walk away with all of it."

"And in exchange I do what, exactly? Smile for cameras and pretend I didn't watch a bride call me a—" I stopped myself. Didn't give him the word. Wouldn't give anyone in this room the satisfaction of repeating it.

"You marry me," he said. "You attend what you're required to attend. You don't ask questions you don't need answers to."

"No."

He blinked. Just once. It was, I would learn, the closest thing to surprise his face was capable of.

"No," I said again, steadier this time, because saying it twice made it truer. "I have exactly one thing left after this week, Mr. Stone, and it's the fact that nobody can say I was bought. I won't let that be untrue twice in twenty-four hours."

"Even for twenty million dollars."

"Even for that."

Something almost like respect moved behind his eyes, gone before I could be sure I hadn't imagined it. He didn't push. He didn't need to.

My phone rang.

I almost didn't answer it — private numbers, on a day like this, felt like one more thing waiting to hurt me — but something made me pick up anyway.

"Ms. MaCarro?" A voice I didn't recognize, clipped, professional, the kind that had clearly delivered this exact sentence to a hundred other daughters before me. "This is St. Vincent's. Your mother collapsed at home about twenty minutes ago. We need to move forward with the surgery tonight — her aortic valve won't hold otherwise. I need you to authorize payment before we can proceed."

The number she gave me didn't sound real. It sounded like something you'd see attached to a house, not a heartbeat.

"I don't—" My voice cracked clean down the middle. "I don't have that. Please, there has to be a payment plan, there has to be—"

"Ma'am, I'm sorry. Without the deposit, we can't schedule her for tonight."

I lowered the phone. The room had gone very quiet, and very far away, and my eyes had filled without my permission, hot and humiliating, right there in front of a man who'd already watched me get called a whore in front of four hundred people that morning.

Ace didn't say anything. He didn't reach for me, didn't offer some hollow I'm sorry. He just watched, still, patient, like he already knew exactly how this ended and was simply giving me the dignity of arriving there myself.

I looked at the folder. At the number that would have meant nothing to him and meant my mother's life to me.

I picked up the pen.

My hand shook signing my name — badly enough that the N came out jagged, nothing like my usual signature — and I hated that he was close enough to see it.

He didn't comment. He didn't smirk. He slid a glass of water across the table, wordless, and pushed it an inch closer when I didn't immediately take it.

It was nothing. A glass of water solved nothing.

It was also the first thing anyone had done for me in eleven hours that didn't come with a price tag attached to it.

The lawyer gathered his papers and left without a word, the door clicking shut behind him with a finality that made the room feel smaller. For a long moment, neither of us spoke. Ace studied me the way he might study a line item he wasn't sure he'd priced correctly.

"One rule," he said finally. "Whatever you think is happening right now — whatever this feels like — it isn't. This is a business arrangement. My board needs to see stability after this morning, not a scandal with a sequel. That's all you are to them. That's all this is."

"Understood," I said, because it was easier than admitting I hadn't been thinking anything was happening at all, until he'd said it wasn't.

He walked to the door. Paused there, hand on the frame, and looked back at me with something that almost passed for a warning.

"And don't G****e me tonight," he said. "You won't like what you find."

Then he was gone.

I lasted, by my own count, eleven seconds.

I typed his name into the search bar sitting alone in the empty conference room, already regretting it, already unable to stop myself — the same way you can't stop touching a bruise to check if it still hurts.

The first headline alone nearly made me drop the phone.

ACE STONE: THE MOST DANGEROUS CEO IN AMERICA.

Under it, a photo of him mid-stride outside a courthouse, expression carved from granite, four different lawsuits cited in the caption alone.

I scrolled once, out of morbid curiosity, straight into a listicle titled 7 Executives Who Destroyed Their Rivals Without Blinking — his photo was the thumbnail for all seven entries, apparently, because the internet had run out of new pictures of him being terrifying and started recycling the same one.

"Great," I muttered to the empty room, to nobody, to the ring still cold and unfamiliar on my finger. "I married a Bond villain."

Somewhere down the hall, I was almost certain, the actual Bond villain was already on his phone, closing another deal, entirely unaware that his new wife was sitting alone in his conference room, laughing — badly, wetly, somewhere between tears and hysteria — at the sheer, catastrophic scale of what she'd just signed up for.